A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism Read online

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  I - A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM

  II - A COMMUNIST WITH STYLE

  III - THE BEAR AND THE PRINCESS OF LIGHT

  IV - THE CAT-KEEPER IN WARSAW

  V - THE LEGEND OF THE BERLIN WALL—AS PRESENTED BY A MOLE

  VI - FROM GULAG TO GOULASH: THE INTRODUCTION TO MS. PIGGY’S HUNGARIAN COOKBOOK

  VII - AN INTERVIEW WITH THE OLDEST DOG IN BUCHAREST

  VIII - THE UNUSUAL CASE OF THE PSYCHOTIC RAVEN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM

  SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ was born in Croatia in 1949. Her nonfiction books include How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, a feminist critique of Communism that brought her to the attention of the public in the West; The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War, a personal eyewitness account of the war in her homeland; Café Europa: Life After Communism (Penguin); and They Would Never Hurt a Fly (Penguin). Drakulić is also the author of the novels Holograms of Fear, which was a bestseller in Yugoslavia and was short-listed for The Best Foreign Book Award by The Independent (UK), The Marble Skin, The Taste of a Man (Penguin), S. (Penguin), and Frida’s Bed (Penguin). A writer and journalist who was published in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Book Review, and The Nation (where she is a contributing editor), as well as many other European magazines and newspapers, she now lives in Sweden and Croatia.

  Advance Praise for

  A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

  “Orwell taught us in Animal Farm that a satirical fable could introduce us to Stalinism. For our own postcommunist age, Slavenka Drakulić summons her own group of animals, each with its own literary genre, and each with a story to tell about life in a communist country. The mouse and the mole, the pig and the parrot, the raven and the bear, the cat and the dog, all seek and find ways to remind us of a time and place, and so teach us the difference between stale commemoration of the graying past and the warmth and wetness and dread and darkness of life truly and bravely recalled. This daring triumph of literary style transforms a receding epoch into the eternal present, beautifully rendering the dilemmas of life under communism as sharp instances of moral tragedy and poignant examples of the limits of self-knowledge. Literature here is an aide de memoire, not just of historical experience, but of why we choose to forget.”

  —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

  Praise for Café Europa: Life After Communism

  “Profound and often bitingly funny . . . you’ll never think about capitalism, modern history, or your perfect, white, American teeth in the same way again.”

  —Elle

  ʺInsightful . . . Café Europa not only helps to illuminate the political and social problems facing most of Eastern Europe, but also sheds new light on the daily life of its residents, their emotional habits, fears, and dreams. . . . Moving and eloquent.”

  —The New York Times

  “Where less sensitive observers might only bemoan the legacy of communism, Drakulić knows her people well and sees the redeeming nature of all their human frailty; for their sake, we should read her book.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “An important and timely book that deserves the widest possible audience.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  Praise for They Would Never Hurt a Fly

  “In this powerful series of reports from The Hague’s international courtroom, Slavenka Drakulić confronts the Yugoslav war’s grand villains and banal perpetrators as she fearlessly contemplates both the individual character of evil and the tragic, chillingly impersonal mechanisms of war. Writing with her hallmark blend of forthrightness, open-eyed irony, and psychological discernment, Drakulić gives us disturbingly intimate vignettes of war criminals who might have been her own (and our) neighbors, even as she illuminates one of our time’s most daunting and urgent questions: How ordinary men and women turn, and are turned, into genocidal killers. An important and a necessary book.”

  —Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation and After Such Knowledge

  “In the first in-depth look at the war crimes trials in The Hague, Slavenka Drakulić has written a deeply personal and lucid account. She brings to life the men who destroyed Yugoslavia—mediocre people who committed extraordinary crimes.”

  —Laura Silber, coauthor of Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation

  “Lucidly written . . . a devastating book . . . [Drakulić’s] direct, personal style does justice to the weight and grimness of these stories.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. ● Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) ● Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England ● Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) ● Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) ● Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India ● Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) ● Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2011

  Copyright © Slavenka Drakulić, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism,” “The Cat-Keeper in Warsaw” and “An Interview with the Oldest Dog in Bucharest” from Two Underdogs and a Cat by Slavenka Drakulić. Copyright © Slavenka Drakulić, 2009.

  PUBLISHERʹS NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Drakulić, Slavenka, 1949-

  A guided tour through the museum of communism : fables from a mouse, a parrot, a bear, a cat, a mole, a pig, a dog, and a raven / Slavenka Drakulić. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-50252-5

  1. Communism—Europe, Eastern--Fiction. 2. Post-Communism—Europe, Eastern—

  Fiction. 3. Animals—Fiction. 4. Satire. I. Title.

  PS3554.R2375G85 2011

  813’.54—dc22 2010038778

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  In memory of my long-gone canine friends,

  Poli, Kiki, and Charlie

  Who controls the past controls the future.

  Who controls the present controls the past.

  —GEORGE ORWELL

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the Fischer Foundation in Germany for their generous grant, which enabled me to work on this book. My thanks to the IWM—the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, and to their anonymous friend who financed my Milena Jesenská grant in 2008.

  Special thanks for her help with the U.S. edition to Professor Marci Shore from Yale University, to Janos M. Kovacs from IWM for his help with the Hungarian story, to my Albanian colleague, writer Bashkim Shehu, for helping me with the story about Albania, and to Claudia Ciobanu, for her help with the Romanian story.

  I am grateful to Rujana for her inspiration, to Andi for his enthusiasm and to Richard for his improvements—as well as to my dear friends for their trust and support.

  A SHORT NOTE TO THE READER

  I am aware that, if you are not familiar with Eastern Europe under Communism, some stories from this book might appear to you highly fictitious, if not outright fantasy. Therefore, I would like to assure you that, unfortunately, this is not the case. From the point of view of persons and events described, regardless of whether a story is narrated by a dog, a cat, or some other domestic, wild, or exotic animal, it all really happened. This is easy enough to check. Indeed, as a fiction writer I often felt shamed by the imagination of politicians, of which there is ample proof in this book!

  However, writing again and again about the rule of Communism and its consequences for ordinary people, I came to the conclusion that we did not have “too much history,” as it is often said about this part of the world. Rather, we had too much memory and too many myths. And, in my life experience, this is a dangerous combination that has often resulted in ideology and manipulation leading to conflict and terrible suffering.

  I

  A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH THE MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM

  Come in, come in, please! Don’t worry, this i
s only a museum of Communism, not the real thing!

  I am joking. But do come in, please. You are Hans, from Würzburg, I presume? I was expecting you. I am Bohumil, your distant relative. I live in this Prague museum in a school cabinet, among the old textbooks. It suits me. I am a bookish type, a book mouse, one could say, ha-ha! Some time ago my grammar school became a private university and the classrooms were refurbished. My cabinet was thrown out. I thought that would be the end of my comfortable life. But luckily, some people from the museum came along and brought the cabinet here, as an exhibit from the old times.

  I share my days with Milena, an elderly cleaning woman who also sells souvenirs in the museum shop. She pretends that she doesn’t know that I live here. But why then, I ask you, did she try to kill me with her broom the very first time she saw me, an ordinary little mouse? Well, not kill perhaps, but scare me off. As I had no other place to go, she reconciled herself to my existence. Perhaps she thought that, after all, I am an underdog just like her? Now she leaves crumbs of bread and pieces of apple and cheese near my cabinet every evening before she leaves. Often, when we are alone, she is talking to me. She calls me Bohumil! She says, “You know, Bohumil, what happened to me today?”—and then goes on with her story. I usually stand on the windowsill and listen to her, keep her company. It took me some time to understand that since there is nobody around, Bohumil is—well, me!

  She went out to smoke a cigarette now; she won’t be back for a while. The only thing I hold against Milena is that she’s a heavy smoker, even though it’s bad for her health. And for mine, too. In fact, I discovered that I have an allergy to cigarettes. Although she often opens a window to the courtyard to let out the smelly air. It’s an old habit from when she used to work in the state archive as a secretary. Not as a cleaner, mind you. Milena studied English and French. Speaking of air, she says that any institution that has anything to do with the Communist state, even this one, smells of dust. Perhaps from too many papers, documents about God knows what and God knows whom . . . Milena used to worry, you know, if her husband was registered in the files of the secret police. Of course he was registered! Like, he was a “security risk”! “Any state that has to depend on police reports about citizens like him, just an ordinary engineer in an electrical plant, is pathetic!,” she used to say to her friend Dáša, a cleaning woman from the casino downstairs. But obviously, this is how it was; every citizen was considered to be a “security risk” back then. However, in the new democracy, because of so-called privatization, her Marek lost his job. That’s why she works here; they need the money.

  I cannot say that I mind living in this museum, although it was really more interesting living in the grammar school. I learned a lot about Communism by listening to the lectures of a history teacher there. Perlík was his name. I heard that he was also a poet, a kind of dissident intellectual, and that he even spent some time in jail when he was young.

  You don’t have such a museum in Würzburg, you say, and your knowledge of Communism is almost nonexistent. Well, since you are here in Prague as a tourist, I could show you around. I consider myself qualified to be a guide here, but the sad truth is that the museum would not employ a mouse. I can tell you that the more time I spend here, the more I realize how important this museum is. I remember Professor Perlík’s words that the time would soon come when kids would say: Communism, what’s that? A religion? A maker of cars perhaps? And from what I heard from him, this is simply not right, Communism shouldn’t be remembered just by the likes of the professor or Milena, who survived it. It should be remembered for its bad sides and good; there must have been something good one can say about it, although that’s not a popular view to hold these days, I gather. For example, people could get a solid education, they say. Or there’s the fact that the Communist USSR fought against the Nazis in the Second World War. Yet Milena says that watching Hollywood movies one gets the impression that it was the Americans who won it all on their own!

  No, life under Communism should not be forgotten, although that is exactly what I see happening. In this museum shop, by the way, you can buy a history book about the dark past for only five euros. It’s cheap. And it is only a hundred pages long, in large print. “The older I get, the more I appreciate it,” says Milena. You can read here, for example (I heard someone reading it with my own ears!), that the wife of President Klement Gottwald was rather fat, or that the wife of Antonín Novotný (the man who later became president himself) took the china and the bedsheets from the flat of Vladimír Clementis. Of course, only after he was executed in the purges of the fifties. You can also learn—as I did—that 257,964 people sentenced for political reasons were rehabilitated in 1990.

  Some visitors don’t care at all about such facts; they just purchase posters, stamps, T-shirts, and USSR military caps, along with wax candles in the forms of Stalin, Marx, and Lenin. These are the single most popular souvenirs sold in the shop, I can tell you, maybe because they are the cheapest. I admit that I can hardly imagine the excitement of a person watching Stalin slowly melt down into a puddle of wax, but there are buyers who enjoy such symbolic acts.

  As you come in, you inevitably notice busts and statues of Marx, Lenin, Stalin. A young man, a Czech, was here recently. Looking at Marx, he said: “Is that some Orthodox priest?” You could say that Marx, with his beard, did indeed look like one. You could also say that he was rather orthodox in his views and, in some ways, even like a priest, preaching his doctrine. But even I was astonished by the young man’s ignorance. What would Professor Perlík have made of his question? He would wonder what they teach them in history class nowadays, and would probably tell the boy, Well, read about him, you durak! That means stupid in Russian, but they don’t teach them Russian anymore. It is sad, although understandable. From my limited perspective as a mouse, a language is a language. It is worth learning regardless of the historical circumstances, no? But what can such an ignorant person read here in the museum about a historical figure like Karl Marx and the origins of Communism? See, here it says that he was “a bohemian and an intellectual adventurer, who started his career as a romantic poet with an inclination toward apocalyptic titanism, a sharp-tongued journalist”—as if that would somehow disqualify him from writing Das Kapital! Or look at this text about Lenin: “From the very beginning, Lenin pushed for the tactics of extreme perfidiousness and ruthlessness which became characteristic of all Communist regimes of the time.” What can I tell you? I know from Professor Perlík’s lectures that in Communist times, Lenin was glorified much too much, and that textbooks were even more seasoned with such descriptions and with the same kind of cheap psychology as this one! But the professor would probably say that there is no need for ideology nowadays and that we need history instead.

  You know, sometimes when they come to this room with paintings from the Soviet school of socialist realism, with busts and a spaceship and a school class and a workshop—all in one room!—I can see how disappointed visitors are. I peek out at them from my cabinet, and our visitors look to me like those people who love to visit freak shows with a two-headed goat or a bearded woman—that kind of thing. Of course, I see why they are disappointed—there is no Stalin in a cage, not even a mummy of Lenin! They see only a heap of old things here, more like a junkyard, which in fact it is. Exhibits here are from flea markets and all kinds of garage sales, even straight out of rubbish bins. See, here Communism is finally reduced to the rubbish heap of history! Isn’t that what the velvet revolution in 1989 was all about? That is what I would like to tell them when they make faces, like, Is that all you have here? What more would they want to see?

  Permit me to say that, from what I have heard from the professor, Communism is not so much about exhibits, about seeing. It is more about how one lived in those times, or more to the point, how one survived them. From the lack of food or shoes to the lack of freedom and human rights. The question is, How do you present that kind of shortage, shortages that were not just poverty-induced, to somebody who knows very little about it? Because people who experienced life under Communism tend not to come here, anyway. I am afraid that our Innocent Visitor, as I call such people, has to use his imagination. Therefore, I sometimes think that Milena is the best “exhibit” they could see here, because she lived most of her life under Communism. If only visitors would ask her about her life . . . but nobody does.